Perfect Monster
by pixeled
Summary: Angeal/Genesis. He smells like death, earth, and apples. His fingers are too needy, his lips too greedy, and he’s pulling at Angeal’s shirt and nipping at his throat and kissing and kissing and trying to get at his very core.


"**Perfect Monster"**

"What have you done, Genesis?" Angeal whispers. Blood is on Genesis's face and it's in his hair, on his hands. He trembles like a leaf. He tries to say something but his voice doesn't quite work and he's covered with dirt, too, and he's stumbling toward Angeal, the whites of his eyes stark only because they are rimmed with red. His arms are spreading wide and he has a heart-broken look on his face. He needs acceptance. He needs Angeal.

He smells like death, earth, and apples. His fingers are too needy, his lips too greedy, and he's pulling at Angeal's shirt and nipping at his throat and kissing and kissing and trying to get at his very core.

"Don't leave me," he whimpers, like a lost child, and Angeal can see the desperation in his eyes though he only returns the kisses half-heartedly.

"Tell me what you've done," Angeal insists, but the tears in Genesis's eyes speak volumes.

"Do you remember," he begins, fingers grasping harder, pulling Angeal to him so that his frenzied breath is on his cheek, his chin, his throat. It feels warm and inviting because the morning is crisp and there is frost on the trees and on the ground. It's familiar but alien, a strange mixture. This is not the Genesis he has always known.

"Remember what?" Angeal prompts. His eyes are patient, but his heart hurts. What has Genesis done?

"Do you remember when we first confided in each other?" Genesis says, the barest of emotion in his voice, his eyes sad, longing.

"_Tell me again, Angeal," Genesis breathed, voice a lazy drawl. Angeal watched the gentle rise and fall of his friend's chest and smiled indulgently even though Genesis's eyes were closed. _

"_It only needs telling once," he returned, shifting carefully against the bark of the great Banora White tree that shaded Genesis's family's yard like the arch of an entrance to a great hall or a sacred place. This was a sacred place for them, more sacred than any other. Genesis was draped across Angeal's lap, his arms stretched lazily by each side, fingers idly toying with blades of grass. By their side a scrapbook lay open, its pages flying back and forth in the warm wind. Pictures revealed themselves lazily – from newspaper and magazine clippings, all of the same face. Disinterested eyes slipped through the pages and Angeal watched them as if the pictures moved through time, as if the eyes were seeing past the camera to him. He catches the title of one of the articles: "White-haired Boy to Become Youngest General Ever Lived"._

"_Tell me again, Angeal," Genesis repeated. The way he said it had an effect on Angeal. That voice always had, from the first time they met. It could get him to do anything. That voice could make him lie to his mother, tell her he was one place while he was really here with Genesis. Genesis who was on his lap like a lazy cat staring up at the afternoon sky. But Angeal wasn't this cat's owner. If anything, Genesis owned him with that melodic voice, those little knowing smiles, and those eyes that seemed to burn though they were the gray of rocky earth with flecks of warm brown. It was that voice that made him begin again, made him tell the story._

_They were both romantic fools, and the story of Angeal's father made them both yearn for something more than Banora. _

"_I was six months old when he died," Angeal recounted, "but before he was gone he wrote my mother a letter. He knew that he would not survive his last battle, and so he wrote to her, 'Though it may be painful, tell my son I lived and died so that he may live, so that he may grow up to make his mother proud. Let him have my sword. It was forged in Banora by his grandfather, wielded by two men who have died protecting their honor and their dreams, two men who loved so much and wanted better things for the world. Let him know that that sword, the Buster sword, represents his father's dreams and honor, and let him know that they are his now.'"_

_Genesis stirred, lifting his head off Angeal's lap and sitting up by him on the grass, his white shirt stained with dirt and his eyes full of dreams. _

"_Can you feel it?" Genesis whispered, chest heaving, earthy eyes pricked with tears. Angeal nodded. "Destiny, my friend." And his fingers, smelling of earth and grass and the boyish scent of dreams slid against Angeal's neck and held him. They were so close, Genesis almost in his lap, their knees touching. With his free hand he picked up the book and turned to a page. There the sad eyes stared up at them, there the clipping told them about honor and dreams and the passage from boyhood to manhood. "We can leave this place, we can leave and do something big. Gillian won't look at you with so much sadness anymore, Angeal. My parents will love each other again. They'll love me again." _

_The foolish dreams of youth—he never expected they would be shattered._

_Angeal could see his mother's sad smile even then. Those eyes that stared up from the page reminded him of his mother's eyes. Even Genesis's eyes reminded him of her silent sadness at times. He remembered asking her to show him a picture of his father. She had frozen. She had said, 'I burned them all' in a faraway voice and stared into the pit of the hearth fire as it licked the pot of soup she was cooking. But it wasn't true. One morning while she was out he'd found a picture of a man who looked nothing like he did, but the sword, _his_ sword, was strapped to his back and his arms were crossed with pride. He had messy blond hair and deep blue eyes, with a deep cleft in his chin. Angeal had none of these things. He looked like his mother—dark hair as black as the night, deep brown eyes, and even as a boy the features of his face were sharp, pointed. No, he looked nothing like this man who was his father. _

Angeal can still hear his mother weeping violently even then, with Genesis's eyes upon him.

"_No! Don't tell him!" she cried, but Hollander shook his head and rested his hand on Angeal's shoulder. The scene seemed surreal with all the stark white of the lab surrounding him, like he was being told the truth only after he was dead. _

"_He should know, Gillian," he was saying, quietly, reassuringly, but his mother's eyes looked so apologetic, so haunted. _

"_What should I know?" Angeal asked. He was fourteen, he had been administered mako injections for a year now by this very man. _

"_I'm your father, Angeal," Hollander whispered. Gillian couldn't bear it and left the room. He looked up into Hollander's face from the examining bed and could see his own face reflected in the glass case behind the scientist's head. And, with startling clarity he realized that it was the truth. He had Gillian's eyes, Gillian's soft black hair, but there was no mistaking that he looked like Hollander too. Did that man in the picture ever know? Had he died believing Angeal was his rightful son?_

Genesis's words come back to Angeal then.

"_We are connected by a terrible fate, Angeal, and we must put an end to those who dared to hurt us. Gillian hurt you by not telling you the truth, Angeal. Gillian has blood on her hands. Anyone who can make a child a monster and can live with it should die," he spat. _

"You killed them," Angeal says. Genesis composes himself, runs his fingers through his hair and straightens his back, nodding solemnly.

"By our tree. I've buried them by our tree," he whispers.

"Genesis . . ." Where is your honor? Where is your pride? All these thoughts and more.

"Angeal, I had to. You of all people should know. I had to." He opens his arms, he craves an embrace, acceptance, but Angeal shakes his head and takes a step back. Those eyes, once gray with flecks of warm brown are now an icy blue. "Monsters don't have pride. Or dreams. Or honor. Angeal, all we have is each other. We can seek revenge together, we can . . ."

"No," Angeal says, and for the first time he denies Genesis, refuses that silken voice that had always been his siren song. And though Gillian had hurt him, he turned his back and sought her out. Was he a monster if he could still care for his mother?

_Okay, so I know things didn't go down entirely like this, but it was what my brain gave me. I was told after I wrote it that Angeal _did_ know his adoptive father and that he died after working too hard to pay for the Buster sword. Whoops. Well, I guess this can be an AU interpretation, then. I hope this is still a good read despite the inaccuracy?_


End file.
